A strange thing happened to me a few weeks ago, a sort of baptism if you like. I was born into the Deep South by swimming in the Black Warrior River. It wasn’t the sort of spot made for swimming and, in fact, as the mist hung just above the surface of the green black water, I was gripped by a fear of the unknown beneath and repeated warning that all four types of snakes found in the U.S. made it down to Alabama, but I got in.
After this spiritual experience, an awakening into a landscape I wanted to know more intimately, I began to worry about the cleanliness of the water. This was, of course, completely irrational and I believe it was brought on by America’s extreme paradox of cleanliness. To one end, America has a sort of paranoia about keeping perfect health, characterized by insurance advertisements and posters in university bathrooms reminding us how to wash our hands, a ritual I would hope we have all been partaking in for sometime now.
And it was this mentality that crept into my head as I began to imagine what was lurking in the river. But this was the stuff of fantasy. I realized it had been put there by a number of overprotective measures, the nature of which I did not fully notice until I saw something in the entrance to Publix. On my right sat two dispensers of “trolley-wipes.” I could not quite understand the need to wipe down a vehicle designed to carry around products already wrapped in two or three layers of protective plastic. This was furthered by a trip to the doctors during which I was asked to open the door with a tissue covering my hand.
And yet, the other extreme exists here, too. I have often found myself sinking into my plate at an absurd hour in Waffle House and wondering how, if the lights never turn off in there, how they can possibly keep it clean. And yet there’s never an empty table. The revolving doors of many 24-hour food stops never stop turning. And there’s certainly the trend for a lifetime brought up in a rural setting, which, like my own childhood summers, consists of moldy fruit and mud pits, a delight for the immune system.
The second words of wisdom I received from my grandparents before arriving was that America is a nation of “eternal bathers.”
“I don’t want you to become one of them,” they shrieked, and, to an extent, their prediction was correct. But it’s never as simple as that in America; one end of the spectrum always demands the presence of the other. Even in the matter of hygiene concerns, this is still true. It’s a country feeding off contradiction in the most subtle of ways. That’s what made it so exhilarating as I floated downstream.
Lucy Cheseldine is an English international exchange student studying English literature. Her column runs on Tuesday.
